Review by Booklist Review
Hogwash, you say? Take a closer look. Geisert literally and visually interprets the word with his signature skinny piggies in this wordless picture book. What do piggies love to do? Play in the mud, of course. Not to worry the mama pigs know just how to get their young ones clean. Intricately detailed, colored etchings follow the dirty piglets through a series of Rube Goldberg-like mechanical contraptions, much like a porcine car wash, finishing with the clean piggies clothes-pinned on lines and hung out to dry. A master of the page turn, only Geisert could take a one-word title and create such an engaging scenario and go hog wild with inventiveness. These little piggies don't cry, Wee Wee Wee all the way home; they just entertain in whole-hog style.--Cummins, Julie Copyright 2008 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Somewhere in the Midwest lies a village inhabited by genteel pigs with a flair for civil engineering, their ingenuity documented in many collections of Geisert's (Lights Out) elaborate hand-colored copperplate etchings. This time, in a series of straight-faced, deftly composed spreads, Geisert shows the village piglets playing in giant mud baths and overturning huge vats of paint. The piglets-nearly a hundred of them-must be scrubbed down, and the community maintains a gigantic machine for just this purpose, an automated assembly that wets, washes and dries them: in short, a hogwash. The etchings have no accompanying text; the pictures contain all the necessary information. Readers will be able to follow the water flowing through a sluice into the immense boiler, half-teapot, half-eggplant, and then into the wooden bathing vat that swishes from side to side (box of powdered detergent controlled by pulley and string from a control tower up top), and watch the pigs ride through the drying apparatus, also wood-fired, and onto the wind-turbine-driven clothesline-er, pigline. Every pipe leads somewhere, and all the technology looks workable. The pigs appear delighted with the whole process. Readers will be, too. Ages 4-8. (Mar.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Horn Book Review
(Primary) Up the hill, all is orderly. Well-kept houses with window boxes and weathervanes nestle among the trees. Calm, tidy pig children bid good-bye to their loving parents and head off down the hill. To school? No, to the mud hole. They wallow, swim, dance, and run amuck. Then they proceed to an abandoned paint factory and get even dirtier. Broom-wielding mother pigs appear and herd the filthy multitudes to the hogwash, where they are washed, rinsed, dried, and aired in a series of marvelous and highly detailed processes involving ingenious contraptions that harness water and wind power. This story has no words, but if it did, they would include bellows, boiler, flange, sluice, gear, pump, electromagnetic coil, and undershot waterwheel. Geisert's watercolor and pen-and-ink pictures invite readers to trace the mechanical connections in this tantalizing, quirkily dignified, and joyous world, where getting clean is as much fun as getting dirty. (c) Copyright 2010. The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
How to get dozens of piglets and their clothes clean after a day's romp in mud and paint? Taking cues from both Rube Goldberg and perhaps his local car-wash, Geisert parades squadrons of tiny porkers through a riotously elaborate mass bath/laundry constructed in a desert setting from old-timey looking pipes, struts, tanks, boards, pulleys, water wheels and like gear. Because the view repeatedly shifts from wide-angle to close-up, some backing and forthing may be necessary to follow the smiling troupe through soaping and rinse, air drying and a finishing trip pinned to long, revolving clotheslines, but, as always, Geisert's microscopic figures are individually drawn, so there's plenty of small-scale side business to pick out along the way. Readers and prereaders both will chortle, whether they come upon this before or after their individual ablutions. (Picture book. 5-8) Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
